Read if you can. Listen if you can’t.

 
It’s a word you’ve said to your kids, most likely because your parents said it to you. And, if you were lucky, you weren’t challenged on its meaning. Had you been, would you have known what to say?

Mommy, daddy, is humbug a bad word?

Put your hand down, Scrooge. This has nothing to do with you. You may have found the real meaning of Christmas, but you didn’t repeat your performance with humbug.

No, for that we need to turn to an expert on the subject, a man who popularized and defined the word in its time.

So hurry, hurry, hurry. Right this way. Take a look inside. For one thin dime, come and see the humbug. It’s the eighth wonder of the world. So small, it’s huge.

Welcome to the reality of Phineas Taylor Barnum.

Barnum was, of course, a master showman, He also was, in today’s vernacular, an expert in the art of the punk, what our parents might have deemed a practical joke.

Only that’s not quite right, either.

As a businessman—and make no mistake about it, Barnum never took his eye off the bottom line—Barnum used deception not only to enrich himself, but to expose his customers to sights, sounds, and experiences they might not have otherwise enjoyed.

And, if his customers left the tent, museum, auditorium, or lecture hall admiring his cleverness and skill, well that didn’t hurt, either.

There was nothing like a well-done humbug.

Barnum took issue with Daniel Webster’s definition of the word. Webster defined humbug as an “imposition under fair pretenses,” or today what we would call “false pretenses.” As a verb, it meant “to deceive; to impose on.”

Not so wrote Barnum in his book, The Humbugs of the World. “[T]here are various trades and occupations which need only notoriety to insure success, always provided that when customers are once attracted, they never fail to get their money’s worth.”

A humbug might be ripe with deception, but it didn’t deserve the name unless it provided value for both the humbugger and the humbugee.

Otherwise, it was a crime.

If anyone knew the cruelty of a deception that provided no value it was Barnum. As a young child, Barnum’s maternal grandfather gave him the deed to a tract of land, near Bethel, Connecticut, called Ivy Island. When Barnum grew up the land would be his.

All through his early years, friends and relatives (who were in on the stunt) reminded Barnum of the value of Ivy Island. No visions of sugar plums danced in young Barnum’s head. No, for him it was the power and prestige of being a rich landowner that he saw when he closed his eyes.

Until he was 12.

That’s when he finally visited what turned out to be a swampy, scraggly patch of land. It’s ivy looked as stubby and grotesque as some of the attractions he would later dangle in front of the public.

According to G. Thomas Couser, author of “Prose and Cons The Autobiographies of P. T. Barnum,”* Barnum later used Ivy Island as collateral when he acquired the American Museum. Irony aside, I suspect Barnum carried the feelings of that moment forward with him when weighing the effects of his humbugs on customers.

In a 1982 article, The New York Times reported that Barnum’s biographer, Arthur H. Saxon, was “convinced that Barnum was…a sensitive and tolerant individual with a sense of mission who believed in giving the public a good laugh for only pennies, and fought hard for unpopular, progressive causes such as women’s rights, freedom for slaves and against the machine-dominated politics of his day.”

Was Barnum dishing out helpings of good deeds one thin dime at a time? Is Saxon executing a humbug of his own?

Maybe not.

For the years Barnum hustled customers through his American Museum, a collection of what Couser called “‘goods’ of admittedly questionable value and authenticity.” Barnum used the museum to turn “the fear of being taken into the pleasure of being taken in.” offering his customers the opportunity to decide, without risk, whether the business transaction they entered into was a sham or not. “Barnum wasn’t charging admission to see the exhibits,” wrote Couser, “he was offering [his customers] the opportunity to pay for the experience of deciding, risk-free, for oneself.”

What do you think? Is being taken in worth it when it’s for your own good? If so, there’s still a patch of land in Connecticut where the ivy won’t get in the way of your enjoyment of the great—albeit damp—outdoors.

If you hurry, hurry, hurry.(764/835)